There is the shock one marine feels at seeing another pulling the gold teeth from a Japanese corpse, and the even greater shock of a marine deciding, until strongly advised otherwise, not to take a severed Japanese hand home with him as a souvenir. It does not take long for the Marines to gauge the bestiality to which this equates: on Guadalcanal they come across a river awash with body parts of their slaughtered comrades, hacked to pieces for the gratification of the Japanese who have killed them. In between they fought in the 'Green Hell' of Cape Gloucester on the island of New Britain, and across the coral wasteland of Peleliu in the Palau Islands, a campaign described by one K Company veteran as 'thirty days of the meanest, around-the-clock slaughter that desperate men can inflict on each other. For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password.

Fascinating account of how the Pacific war progressed through the involvement of one group of Americans.On some islands it hardly stopped raining, men and materiel had to be moved through roads of mud, and jungle had to be cleared.

Devil Dogs: First In, Last Out – King Company From The Guadalcanal To The Shores of Japan by Saul David | 9780008395766. Sledge struggled to find a publisher for his memoir when he first tried in the late 1970s: now that just about everyone is dead (though a gratifying number of the survivors lived well into their nineties), their astonishing bravery and endurance are nearly incomprehensible to a generation whose principal concern is paying their gas bills, and their recollections have a rarity value that makes them highly prized. David chose this unit of men because, with inevitably massive personnel changes, it was in action from the beginning to the end of the Pacific war: from Guadacanal, on the outer limit of Japanese expansion and a relatively short hop from the north coast of Australia, in August 1942, to Okinawa in the summer of 1945 via New Britain, off New Guinea, and Peleliu, east of the Philippines. They landed on the beaches of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands in 1942 - the first US ground offensive of the war - and were present when Okinawa, Japan's most southerly prefecture, finally fell to American troops after a bitter struggle in June 1945. It is like all those films you have seen of the Pacific war; but this is a scholarly work, and the copious footnotes refer the reader to the accounts showing that these remarkable events really happened.For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin.